Professor Alan Scott
University of Innsbruck
Alan Scott holds the established chair in sociology at the University of Innsbruck, Austria and is Coordinator of the European Governance and Civil Society research programme of the School of Political Science and Sociology. He previously taught at the University of Southampton and the UEA. His main areas of research are in political and organizational sociology, and in social theory.
'From 2002 till 2006, I was a member of a Ford Foundation funded research network, "Transatlantic Forum on the Future of Universities". In the course of the work of this network, I became interested in the conflicts that emerge between the external demands placed upon universities in the face of growing international competition, accompanied and stimulated by the (partial) withdrawal of the state, and their 'traditional' functions, notable the reproduction of academic disciplines via teaching and research. In particular, I am interested in how humanities and social science disciplines respond - or fail to respond - to these shifts in the external and internal environment of the university. The Visiting Fellowship will enable me to conduct a series of semi-structured interviews with academics across a range of humanities and social science disciplines, with university managers and with students in order to acquire a sense of how they perceive their roles and the dilemmas they face. My core question concerns the tensions - or perhaps incompatibility - between the self-reproducing nature of disciplines (necessary to protect 'deep specialization') and pressures for change. For the humanities and social science the dilemma is particularly acute because it is increasingly the natural sciences that meet current expectations - e.g. for transferable research, for attracting external funding - and it is their practices that set standards and, to a degree, define legitimacy.
Some recent and relevant publications
Universities, "Relevance" and Scale (with Alan Harding). In A. Harding, A. Scott, S. Laske and C. Burtscher (eds) Bright Satanic Mills: Universities, Territorial Development and the Information Age, Ashgate, Aldershot, 2007: 2-21
Universities and the Regulatory Framework: The Austrian university system in transition (with Christian Burtscher and Pier-Paolo Pasqualoni), Social Epistemology, 20 (3), 2006: 241-58
Politik der Cultural Studies - Cultural Studies der Politik (edited with Karin Harrasser and Sylvia Riedmann). Turia + Kant, Vienna, 2006
Georg Simmel Rembrandt: An Essay in the Philosophy of Art, (co-edited, translated, and introduced with Helmut Staubmann). Routledge, New York, 2005
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